


You and Me (got a whole lot of history)

by Smoakin_dontburnyourself



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Best Friends, Childhood Friends, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-03 02:18:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10957611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smoakin_dontburnyourself/pseuds/Smoakin_dontburnyourself
Summary: (AU) Mickey is seven when he saves Ian from the dangers of the playground monkey bars. Looking down onto the kid, freckles and a wide tooth smile, Mickey decides he’s found something to fight for.





	1. Monkey Bars

**Author's Note:**

> the Cliche is real. Will probably be 3 parts

They met on the playground at school. Ian was six and Mickey was seven. Ian had gotten too ambitious on the monkey bars, climbing halfway across before remembering he was afraid of heights. He was crying when Mickey walked by, swinging a stick left and right. The small boy was dirty and pale and he stopped his swinging when he heard soft sniffles coming up from above. He hesitated but, after a moment of Ian’s soft crying, finally asked something along the lines of  _ What's the matter with you, carrot top?  _ Through his sobbing and blubbering, Ian managed to tell him that he was scared of falling. Mickey nodded, he was scared of some things too, so he knew the feeling. He let him put his feet on his shoulders until the other boy got to the end and climbed down, smiling a wide tooth smile, tears long forgotten. It was the first time someone smiled at Mickey like that, like maybe he mattered and did more than just take up space like Terry always said.  

 

_ What’s your name, anyways? _ Ian asked, once safely on the moltch and having wiped his tears off his cheeks. They spent five minutes trying to get Ian to pronounce it right  _ Mikhailo _ , until Mickey sighed, telling Ian that he could just call him Mickey like everyone else.  _ How old are you? Who’s your teacher? Do you have any pets? What about brothers and sisters?  _ The questions shot out without even a breath in between them, let alone a pause for Mickey to answer. He eyed the freckled boy wearily, not much of a talker, even at only seven. _ You always talk this much, Gallagher? _ Because by then they’d managed around to exchanging last names and street addresses. The other boy nodded, not the slightest bit sheepish of the fact. Once the whistle blew, signaling the end of recess, Ian tackled Mickey into a hug, telling him that he was his hero before disappearing back into the school building. Later on, Mickey would decide that was the moment that he fell for Ian Gallagher. But, right then, nothing more than a kid, all he knew was that he liked the warm and fuzzy feeling he got in his chest when the other boy smiled up at him. 

 

They were best friends from them on, even if Mickey didn’t like to admit it, even when they fought, with their fists and with their words, they always came around, pulled back by the gravity of  _ something _ . It was hard to explain, and things weren’t exactly easy, if anything, they were downright fucked up.    

 

Ian was his constant, the only thing he could really look forward to in that shit hole that they called home. When Terry played punching bag with him, Ian was there, smuggling frozen peas out of his house and meeting him on the porch. When he forgot his lunch or just didn’t have one because Terry was in jail  _ again _ , Ian was there, splitting his sandwich in two and bringing an extra paper bag for weeks. He was freckles and smiles and bad jokes and questions, jesus did the kid have questions. But Mickey didn’t care because Ian was  _ there _ , he didn’t leave like his mom and most everyone else. Sometimes, as they got older, old enough to realize that the world was cruel and didn’t much care about them, it hurt to look at him, bright as he was, like looking directly at the sun.

 

The first time Mickey landed himself in juvie, Ian was there, behind a wall of glass smudged with fingerprints, but  _ there _ . He talked about civic pride, about there being other shit to do besides petty theft, about what classes he was taking next year, about college. He talked a lot, but it didn’t bother Mickey when he did, as long as he got to hear his voice. Ian never looked at him like everyone else did, like a fuck up, despite Mickey knowing that’s probably what he was anyways. He wasn’t stupid, and any innocence he might of had when he met Ian on that playground had been swiftly beaten out of him faster than he could grow pubes. It was nice to have anyways, someone who saw more. Ian would leave his own fingerprint on the clear barrier that day, laughing at Mickey’s hushed demands,  _ get your hand off the fucking glass _

 

Years went by and he wondered if Ian ever got tired of him. He knew the rest of the Gallaghers weren’t that fond of him, not after he’d made himself a regular guest in juvie, at least. Lip, the older brother, had told him as much before, and Fiona, the sister, probably thought he was some sort of bad influence, like what he had was contagious or some shit. He couldn’t have helped the matter when he showed up on the front porch of the noisy Gallagher house, hiding the fresh tattoo that spanned over his knuckles  _ Fuck-U-Up _ , it’d been Joey’s Idea, said It’d give him more cred in juvie. He was fifteen when he did it, and stupid, and he’d regretted it when the eldest Gallagher sibling spotted it and gave him a disapproving look.

 

They didn’t know, couldn’t have known, that he sat at the foot of Ian’s bed and went over geometry theorems with him, that they learned the state capitals together. When would he ever need to know that Cheyenne was the capital of fucking Wyoming? Never, that's when, but Ian smiled at him everytime he got one right so it really was a no brainer, he memorized all fifty. Regardless, he couldn’t blame them, he was a Milkovich afterall, and that name came with a lifelong sentence of rotting in the Southside of Chicago.

  
Mickey thought that he had to get tired of it, of how different they were, of how different they saw life. Ian was optimism and dreams, he was family dinners and hope, he was unapologetic and  _ brave _ . He was relentless and annoying, and he was the little kid on the playground that wanted to believe that the boy that saved him from the terrifying monkey bars would amount to something more. It scared Mickey, the thought of being something more, it scared him because maybe even then, he wouldn’t be  _ enough _ . 


	2. Supernova

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They were high as fucking kites when Mickey finally worked up the nerve to ask, When are you gunna fucking give up on me, Gallagher?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been practicing writing Ian and Mickey as much as I can, sometimes the tone of the show and their relationship is so hard to pin down. I'd appreciate any comments on improvements or thoughts on the tone of the story/ relationship. I just love these two so much and want to do my bbys justice
> 
> Also, any errors are mine pls point them out :)

Sometimes, when they got old enough to be angry, Ian would ask him _Are you ever gunna grow some fucking balls and stand up to him?_ They never really got into specifics, there was only ever one ‘him’ when it came to Mickey and a busted lip, or a cracked rib, or a nasty shiner

Usually, Mickey would tell him   _butt the fuck out Gallagher_ , other times, when his body ached too much to say anything at all, he would grunt and flip him off.   

On one of those nights, the kind where his body ached and throbbed, fifteen and already irremediably scarred, he did neither of those two things. It was summer, so even in the darkness, Mickey’s shirt stuck to his back, reminding him of the purple bruises that lived there. Ian had stolen some of the weed from Kev’s Ice cream truck, said it would help with the throbbing. They were high as fucking kites when Mickey finally worked up the nerve to ask, _When are you gunna fucking give up on me, Gallagher?_ Maybe he was a masochist for asking, for wanting to know, but he thought that knowing would help soften the blow when it eventually happened.

Ian’s brow furrowed, as he pulled more weed into his lungs “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“ _This_ ” he clarified, motioning around them, into the empty rooftop where they sat on a blanket. “Hoping that I’ll take the fucking SAT” he continued, unable to meet the other boy’s gaze, despite feeling as it bore into the side of his face.

“Hoping I’ll go to college or some shit, hoping that I’ll stop landing myself in juvie,  hoping that I’ll be more than some southside fuckup?” _hoping, hoping, hoping_ ….. In the darkness, all that could be heard were two steady breaths and the beating of his heart

”Because, truth is, Gallagher, I’m never gunna be all that shit that you’re hoping for” It was the truth rearing its ugly head and it hurt Mickey to say it out loud, but it needed to be said, by him, if only once.

Ian passed over the blunt, eyes fixed on the stars

He let the smoke drag out of his lungs and through his nose before saying “You're _wrong_ ”

The words cut through the summer heat, they turned Mickey inside out, they made him want to scream, to cry, to laugh, to beg. How was he so sure? He wanted to ask him that, Are you fucking with me? He wanted to ask him that too. Maybe it was all some sick joke, maybe it was life setting out to make an example out of him, The little Milkovich who thought he could. Maybe posterity would laugh at him, somehow, maybe Terry Milkovich reincarnated would cite him as an example of where _hoping_ got a Milkovich

and if there was something he’d heard before it was that the answer to that was _nowhere_.  

Mickey was too high to put any of that to words, but it scared him, and he could never get quite high enough to escape that.

Before the topic could be forgotten, amidst smoke and silence, Ian spoke again

“And the answer is _never_ , I’m never giving up on you, Mick. So stop saying that shit” The conviction in Ian’s voice reminded Mickey of when they weren’t too old to make pacts. Scrawny and toothless as they were, sometimes that's all they had, empty promises they made themselves.

They made a pact when they were twelve, or more like Ian made a pact and Mickey didn’t disagree.

They would kill their dads, or something like that. Mickey had been wheezing and nursing a broken rib and Ian had been rubbing at his nails. Spending thirteen hours digging for a dead body was apparently really hard to wash off.

“I’ll kill him” Ian had said, dangerously close to sobbing “I’ll kill him if he ever fucks us over like that again” Mickey had only nodded, he knew the feeling well, it suffocated him sometimes, more than his father’s fists ever could.

They didn’t though, kill their dads, they’d been angry and hurt kids. Maybe still were.

The memory ran through his head just then, high and sweaty on a rooftop with his best friend. Maybe he’d be one of those forgotten childhood pacts someday when Ian was finally happy. Maybe that’s all he’d really ever be to him. And maybe he just had to be okay with that. Ian deserved to get out, he deserved a better father, he deserved a better best friend, he deserved all that sappy shit, he deserved it more than anyone. Who was Mickey to stand in the way of all that shit? _No one_ , sometimes it hurt to remember

Mickey only grunted and let the topic fade into the Chicago skyline.

Mickey tried to push Ian away more times than he was proud of, as they got older and he started to realize how different they really were. The worst one was after Terry died. The Milkovich Patriarch died on a Monday when Mickey was seventeen. He was stabbed in the courtyard of the penitentiary three days before he was to be released on parole. Mickey didn’t cry, he didn’t do much of anything but stare blankly at the officer that stood on the half-lit porch. There was something about the situation that broke some part of him that he hadn’t realized had been hanging so delicately. Was that the fate that awaited him? An unceremonious death in the courtyard of a jail? The thought scared him, even if he’d never admit it. Ian was there, like always, looking at him wearily and prying the bottle of whiskey out of his hand. _I’m here, Mick, if you need to talk_. He didn’t, talk to him, for nearly a month.

When he did, amidst graffiti, broken bottles, and the stench of an abandoned building, he hated himself for it. He told him to fuck off, but that could be expected, he’d been doing that all along, only this time Ian’s feet were planted and he had no intentions of going anywhere. Mickey was only kind of drunk when he told Ian they weren’t friends, _I don’t give a fuck about you Gallager, get that through your thick fucking skull!_ he called him a fag, something he knew but had never used against him. _Polesmoking, cocksucking_ , he sputtered it all into the face of the only friend he’d ever had.

He thought for sure that was it. Ian would turn and leave and never look back onto the ugliness that lived inside the boy he’d spent most of his life knowing.

When Ian did turn, it was to pick up an empty liquor bottle and send it shattering against a vandalized wall.

“You think you’re a fucking tough guy, don’t you Mick?” he picked up another bottle and sent it flying onto the opposite wall “You think you’re so tough when really you’re just a fucking pussy”

“Say it again and I’ll beat the shit out of you” it was a reflex more than a threat but Ian took it and ran, picking up one last bottle and shattering it on the wall nearest to Mickey’s head

“Do it!” he yelled, the walls echoing his anger “Get the fuck up and do it! Hit me!”

He did, he was still a Milkovich after all and his blood was hot, mixing with cheap whiskey. The first punch sent Ian slamming against a wall, clutching at his ribs. He spit a glob of blood at Mickey’s feet out of spite before the four walls heard him speak again

“You wanna fag-bash, Mickey? Is that gunna make you feel like a man? Huh? Well I might be a fag but at least I’m not a fucking coward! I get up every day and face my fucking problems and I try I fucking _try_ ”

Mickey hit him again and this time the red-head hit back, they stumbled, Punching and pulling until Mickey wasn’t sure what they were fighting for anymore. They were struggling, Mickey on top of Ian, in the perfect position to hit him square in the nose, break it probably, give him a concussion, for sure.

Except he didn’t. Mickey kissed him instead.

It felt like coming up for air, like a kindness. He tasted Ian’s blood, or his, he wasn’t quite sure. He knew it didn’t matter because perhaps they’d always been one in the same. The kiss was brutal, a clash of teeth and bruising lips, like maybe they were still fighting. Mickey felt the kiss all the way down to his toes, in his dick, in his heart, consuming him for everything he was worth. He should have known that kissing Ian Gallagher would be like a fucking supernova. It caught him off guard though, enough for Ian to slip his tongue past Mickey's parted lips.   

They didn’t talk for a week afterwards, not for lack of trying on Ian’s part, mostly because Mickey avoided him like the plague. _Mickey, we need to talk, Ignoring me only makes me more persistent_. And Fuck was he right, not that he didn’t already know, but Gallagher was harder to get rid of than herpes

Mickey came to realize that he loved that about Ian. He was relentless and resourceful and scrappy. He didn’t need too much of a reason to get into a fight, even when he knew he didn’t stand a chance. He was the cute little freckled kid that pretended to cry while Mickey snuck past whichever sucker and stole whatever it was they were in the market for that day. The boy that stole to feed the entire neighborhood, _fucking robin hood wannabe_. He was the teenager that, along with his nut case family, kidnapped old people to pose as dead relatives.

Ian was shameless and brilliant and downright stupid and prideful when it came down to some things, when it came down to _him._ He knew it then, staring at Ian fucking Gallagher camped out on his porch, he knew that Ian wouldn't give up on him, hadn't thus far and that had to count for something, right?

Truth was, Mickey didn't know weather to thank god for it or curse him for being one sick bastard.

 


End file.
